Although portable devices are becoming very popular, users still rely on devices that are not portable for a variety of reasons—for example most inexpensive portable devices have limited capacity of processor or storage. Devices with lack of mobility can be compensated for by additional features or additional types of devices that provide access to associated systems or networks. An important example of these, and subject of the present invention, is game consoles.
WiFi and other types of networking has become available in most urban areas, and there are broad ranges of devices that enable the users to easily connect among devices within homes via various types of networking. Additionally, electronic games for social networks and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games are a rapidly growing trend in gaming industry. Further, digital distribution and downloadable content are also becoming a trend in gaming industry. Accordingly, staying connected to the internet or other network has become increasingly essential in gaming.
Further, it is noted that during the last decade video games have become more interactive. Older games utilized button-pressing sequences to simulate more complicated inputs and motions (such as gestures). Because of the fact that such button-pressing sequences are often very complicated, some games have limited audience of users. As gaming consoles devised and include user-operated controls that are easier to use, such game consoles have increasingly attracted users that are not experienced gamers. For example, Nintendo's Wii has variety of games the whole family can play, and the targeted age of users are definitely of wider range compared to some years ago.
The popularity of the Apple™ iPhone™ and subsequent smartphones, PDAs, and other handheld mobile devices with touch interfaces has lead to interest and demand for games that use touch-based and touch-gesture user interfaces. To date the touch capabilities have been somewhat limited. Some newer game controllers and portable game consoles comprise touch-screens, but these typically only offer the X-Y position tracking capabilities of traditional mice or simple flinger-flick gestures.
The High Dimensional Touch Parameter (“HDTP”) touch-pad and touch-screen technologies as taught in U.S. Pat. No. 6,570,078, pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/418,605, pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/761,978, and many other related pending U.S. patent applications provide a wide range of touch-based user interface capabilities—including 3D and 6D interactions, advanced multi-touch, rich information flux, rich metaphors, multi-dimensional extensions to hyperlinks (for example as taught in pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/026,248), and tactile grammars—many of which are very well suited for interactive control of gaming systems. Additionally, HDTP touch-pad and touch-screen technologies can be readily implemented in small, handheld devices. Further as to this, as taught in pending U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 12/418,605 and 61/506,634, medium and high resolutions HDTP touch-screen technologies can be implemented using multiplexed OLED displays or transparent OLED overlays atop LCD displays so that capacitive sensing overlays and associated RF electronics are not required. In such embodiments, the capture and tracking software for gestures and parameters can be implemented in part or entirely in GPU processors, display driver software, and other computational elements within a device.
Two previous pending U.S. Patent Applications by the present inventor—U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 12/502,230 and 12/511,930—share a specification that teaches aspects of game-based applications of HDTP technologies, for example as implemented on a computer (or as implemented on a hand-held device; see FIG. 1f therein).
The present invention provides for the incorporation of selected HDTP features as advantageous for additional embodiments, product, or applications of a game controller, device acting as a game controller, or other related technologies. The present invention additionally pertains to various embodiments of advanced game controllers that include an HDTP touch-pad or touch-screen.